Into the Image: Culture and Politics in the Field of Vision

Into the Image is concerned with the significance of screen and image in contemporary society, and with the nature of our imaginary and psychic investments in visual culture. It considers modern image technologies as means to monitor and survey the world, whilst at the same time maintaining distance and detachment from it. In the coverage of contemporary war, we see most clearly how the world is screened and yet its reality screened out. Into the Image also reflects on the contemporary desire to create an alternative world by means of new image technologies. It asks what is behind the fantasies of migrating into an alternative, virtual reality.

Critical of the dominant technoculture, this book seeks to develop an alternative approach to visual culture based in the realities of the contemporary social order. In its exploration of culture and politics in the field of vision, Into the Image acknowledges the continuing significance of the 'old' technologies of photography, cinema and television alongside that of the new digital developments. The crucial issues, it argues, concern the relation of image and screen culture to experience in the modern world.